AT&T iPhone Upload Speeds Drop to a Crawl

AT&T iPhone users have long complained about the speed and reliability of AT&T’s network, but over the last few days, upload speeds on AT&T’s network have fallen to below 100 Kbps — the kind of speeds one used to get in dial-up days.

On forums at MacRumors and in the comments at Gizmodo, iPhone users in some of the nation’s biggest metropolises, including NYC, were reporting pitiful upload speeds below 100 Kbps — even as download speeds often stayed above 1 Mpbs. Wired.com writer Eliot Buskirk clocked 27 Kbps up on Tuesday morning.

The degraded uploads started on Saturday, according to data provided to Wired.com by Ookla, the company that runs Speedtest.net. Their broadband testing app is installed on more than 3 million iPhones, and they see more than 150,000 speed tests from iPhones daily.

For instance in Seattle, users were getting 525 Kbps down on Friday, but that number fell to 97, 131, and 101, on Friday, Saturday and Monday respectively. Minneapolis upload speeds for iPhones were about 600 Kbps on Friday, falling to 85, 121 and 89, on average, for the long weekend. Speedtest.net recorded similar results for Baltimore; Boston; Cincinnati; Cleveland; Columbus, Ohio; Denver; Des Moines, Iowa; Detroit; Fairfax, Virginia; Houston; Kansas City, Missouri; Las Vegas; New York; Orlando, Florida; Phoenix; St. Paul, Minnesota; Salt Lake City; and Washington, D.C. (Full spreadsheet embedded below)

Users described the new speeds as a cap, but it’s not clear yet whether this is just a network problem or a new policy. A spokesman for AT&T said the company will explain the situation soon.

AT&T’s networks have long been a sore spot for iPhone users who complain about dropped calls and overwhelmed cell towers, even as the company has tried to bolster the network with new towers and extra bandwidth it recently purchased in an FCC auction. Just prior to the launch of the new iPhone 4G and a few weeks after the iPad 3G, AT&T retired its unlimited 3G data plans in favor of a two-tier approach: $15 for 200 MB per month or $25 for 2 GB per month — largely interpreted as a way for the company to reduce the strain on its network in anticipation of the iPhone 4 and iPad with wireless subscriptions.

The speed of AT&T’s network has hampered the iPhone, which to date is exclusively offered in the U.S. on AT&T. Apple has crippled data-intensive apps like Multimedia Messaging (MMS) and tethering using the phone as a Wi-Fi spot for a laptop as AT&T’s network could not handle them, though they have been available overseas. Both are now available for the iPhone in the United States.